it's different when you're just reading data, VS writing data, and these benchmarks compared power usage while writing gobs and gobs of data.
Exactly. To determine if people will see battery power saving benefits from using flash vs. hard drives, you need tests that reflect the usage pattern of notebook computers on battery - occasional reads, rare writes, and a lot of idle time. (If your notebook is actually a desktop replacement, then I presume it's plugged in.)
It's the idle time that make a big difference: flash doesn't consume power when idle, whereas with a hard drive you need to either keep that sucker spinning (costing power) or suffer a big performance hit by starting it up for each operation. It's not clear that their benchmarks reflect this usage pattern.
I put a small (4 GB) SSD in my old Vaio SRX77 and get about an extra half hour to 45 minutes of battery life out of it now. Of course, I lot several gigs of storage on the deal, but that's fine - I took a junk machine and for about $70 turned it into something roughly in the class of a Asus Eee on the cheap.
the problem with aluminum wiring was the corrosion problem as aluminum corrodes fast
No. The problem with aluminum wiring is thermal expansion and contraction. When it heats up (resistive losses from the current flowing through it) and cools off, it expands and contracts more than copper. Basically, your aluminum wiring is wiggling a little bit as you turn stuff on and off, which leads to an increased failure rate.
There are ways to mitigate the problem - different aluminum alloys, copper pigtails to fixtures - but it appears that copper is still safer.
Hell I am testing Cu clad Al cat5e wire right now.
Data cable obviously carries different levels of current than power cable, and data cable failure won't burn your house down.
The U.S. mint is essentially just subsiding lazy states who refuse to round off their sale taxes to the nearest nickel.
You don't have to abolish them and raise prices - just make the coins cheaper. The Japanese Yen is worth less a penny (though with the dollar so low it was worth more for a while recently). The coins are aluminum.
But on the rare occasions when I end up with them, I would rather throw them in a recycle bin than the trash.
Wait wait wait wait. Robert Silverberg lacks imagination? Robert Silverberg???
No. He's doing what SF authors often do. "If X continues, here are the consequences!" To which some bright people in society say, "Fsck. That would be bad. We ought to do something about that."
TFA's point is not "The sky is falling!", but "We're going to be making and being subjected to some interesting changes."
Then there's gazillions of miles of copper cable, copper pipes and tubing, etc. Much of it is already being recycled, in fact.
We haven't hit peak oil yet. We haven't even explored all of the oil fields in the oceans, under the two polar caps.
Because those fields are harder to get to. Therefore their oil is harder - more expensive - to extract. That expense includes not just money but energy. I.e., we'll need to use more oil to get that oil out.
That's the point of the "peak oil" idea. We've plucked the low-hanging fruit. To get more fruit, we need to climb the tree. But tree-climbing is hungry work. Fortunately, we've got a food source - the fruit we've been harvesting. Unfortunately, that means there's less fruit to go into the boxes...
(1) an individual has a right to sell the stuff that she owns, and (2) a company has a right to protect their "brand".
The reason a company has a right to protect their "brand" is to protect the consumer. Trademark law (legitimate trademark law, anyway) is meant to protect the public by preventing counterfeiting of goods, not to empower companies to rip off customers by shutting down "unauthorized" resellers who don't charge high enough prices.
Does eBay have any assets in France? Or can they, hopefully, tell the court to go stick its head in a pig?
Unfortunately I can't find a way to raise a dispute on ebay except "contact the seller"
Contact your credit card company, and (if the charge went though them) PayPal. You should be able to register a fraud complaint and get your money back.
I doubt that part of the complaint would stand, because it goes against the first-sale doctrine.
It stood. RTFA: "This ruling came down against eBay on two fronts. The court faulted the online company for `guilty negligence,' for not doing enough to prevent fake goods from being sold on its site. The court also ruled that eBay was responsible for the `illicit sale' of perfumes from the LVMH empire, which can be sold only through the brands' `selective distribution networks.'"
There is no way I would release anything under 'AGPL' or even 'GPL' if it was important to my core business. How am I supposed to pay for a roof over my head!?
You can sell GPLed software. And most software is bespoke.
I've put a roof over my head since 1991 by writing software. Almost all of that software could have been developed under the GPL, because it was either for in-house use, or for a single client (often one to whom we were giving source anyway), or small group of clients who were competitors (and thus wouldn't have shared to the software with each other) and who wanted close support from us.
There's still plenty of software development work - well-paid development work - in a GPL'd world.
Yeah, it's called getting your license. There's absolutely no reason for any kill switch device on general aviation.
Perhaps. My point is only that the "my plane! Mine! Mine! Mine!" argument is bogus.
It may well be that kill switches on small planes would be more trouble than any potential benefit - that sounds reasonable at first blush. But that's not the argument you presented.
Your plane, your property, fine. You want to fly that plane in public airspace? You want the privilege of flying over my house? Then there's a reasonable justification to put various regulations on your plane.
The whole idea of cigarette vending machines is itself fantastically stupid if there is an age cutoff for the legal purchase of cigarettes.
Well, the whole idea of age cutoff for legal purchases is pretty dumb. Hell, if you want to get kids to quit smoking, set a maximum age, not a minimum age - make it look like smoking is something only kids do, and they won't want to do it. Make it look like something only adults do, and you won't be able to stop teens.
You can buy beer out of vending machines on the streets of Japan, though they are usually turned off late at night. I believe the assumption is that during the day, watchful adults would scold whippersnappers trying to buy an Asahi out of a machine.
I'm merely asking what is wrong with mentioning it, that people believe in it...
Nothing at all - in a social studies class. I don't know anyone who argues against that. But discussion of religious beliefs doesn't belong in a biology class.
No one is advocating preaching to kids that it happened
??? A heck of a lot of people certainly are advocating preaching to kids in the schools.
Hmm...then that explains why our currency has "In God We Trust" all over it
Like the insertion of "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance, "In God We Trust" was a Cold War invention, meant to unite us against those Godless Communists. It's ignorant bullshit - and a blatantly unconstitutional "establishment" of religion.
Much of our govt philosophy was based on Judeo-Christian tenets.
Seems to me the only form of government that could be based on "Judeo-Christian tenets" (at least mainstream ones) would be a monarchy - the Bible is full of kings, but I don't recall any elections.
none of us real software nerds (flattering myself again) would ever have thought of writing a program that lets you track your finances, write documents and typeset them
Anybody who has ever worked in a bar, and had to clean up after a person (typically a woman) in a skirt with no underwear on has sat on a bar stool knows why public nudity is a bad thing.
Polite people bring a towel to sit on when they're in such situations. (Oddly, nudists sitting on a towel is one use that Douglas Adams missed.)
The reason that we don't want people screwing in the streets can be easily reduced to manners.
Well, I'm not sure how we jumped from public nudity to screwing in the streets. But there's a difference between non-conformity, rude behavior, and criminal behavior. Non-conformist behavior says "I don't give a damn about your arbitrary social norms," while rude behavior says "I don't give a damn about you," and criminal behavior (truly criminal, that is, harmful to others) goes beyond that to actively says "Screw you."
But in real life, the idea of all those people at the supermarket being naked, scratching their asses and then checking the tomatoes for freshness, or getting santorum all over the pop-tarts is repugnant.
I don't have a problem with hygiene codes. No shoes, no shirt, no pants, no service, fine. But a very small part of the world consists of grocery stores, and saying "you need to have clothes on in the produce isle!" does not justify making a criminal out of me if I walk out on my front porch with no pants on. Criminalization of behavior should be the exception.
After all, can't we say: "Christ, Bush is such a great oil man, that he goes and invades the world's largest untapped source of oil, and now gas is $5 / gallon."
It's already at $5 where you are? Fsck.
But it was never about making oil cheap to the consumer. It's about denying oil to the U.S.'s economic-political rivals, and about profits for oil corporations.
Big oil is doing very well, with profits at high levels, and a new round of no-bid contracts going out in Iraq they're finally getting back into the part of the game Iraq kicked them out of decades ago.
The investment class isn't much impacted by paying $100 instead of $50 to fill their SUV, that's chump change.
So, yeah, Bush is a hell of an oil man. He's done wonders for the industry.
You shouldn't be able to take them to court and force them to sell something any more than I should be able to take you to court and force you to sell your house.
Sorry, no. Charter Communications is a corporation; it's very existence is a privilege, not a right. In a sane system, people should be able to petition the government that created a corporation to make said corporation behave in a manner congruent with the public interest.
You and I are natural persons and have natural rights to live more or less as we please. Corporations are artificial creations of the state and have no natural rights; the fact that the law grants them most of the same rights as natural persons is one of the great destructive absurdities of the industrial age.
For the same reason the Department of Commerce is responsible for our atomic clocks?
Standard weights and measures are vital for commerce. It's logical that the Department of Commerce is responsible for our official measurements of time.
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Exactly. To determine if people will see battery power saving benefits from using flash vs. hard drives, you need tests that reflect the usage pattern of notebook computers on battery - occasional reads, rare writes, and a lot of idle time. (If your notebook is actually a desktop replacement, then I presume it's plugged in.)
It's the idle time that make a big difference: flash doesn't consume power when idle, whereas with a hard drive you need to either keep that sucker spinning (costing power) or suffer a big performance hit by starting it up for each operation. It's not clear that their benchmarks reflect this usage pattern.
I put a small (4 GB) SSD in my old Vaio SRX77 and get about an extra half hour to 45 minutes of battery life out of it now. Of course, I lot several gigs of storage on the deal, but that's fine - I took a junk machine and for about $70 turned it into something roughly in the class of a Asus Eee on the cheap.
No. The problem with aluminum wiring is thermal expansion and contraction. When it heats up (resistive losses from the current flowing through it) and cools off, it expands and contracts more than copper. Basically, your aluminum wiring is wiggling a little bit as you turn stuff on and off, which leads to an increased failure rate.
There are ways to mitigate the problem - different aluminum alloys, copper pigtails to fixtures - but it appears that copper is still safer.
Data cable obviously carries different levels of current than power cable, and data cable failure won't burn your house down.
You don't have to abolish them and raise prices - just make the coins cheaper. The Japanese Yen is worth less a penny (though with the dollar so low it was worth more for a while recently). The coins are aluminum.
You could put them in a coin-counting machine.
Wait wait wait wait. Robert Silverberg lacks imagination? Robert Silverberg???
No. He's doing what SF authors often do. "If X continues, here are the consequences!" To which some bright people in society say, "Fsck. That would be bad. We ought to do something about that."
TFA's point is not "The sky is falling!", but "We're going to be making and being subjected to some interesting changes."
Indeed - recycled so profitably that copper wiring and plumbing is being ripped out of houses. And not condemned houses - I mean you go out to dinner and a show, come back and your house's walls have been ripped open.
Catalytic converter theft is also becoming a problem.
Because those fields are harder to get to. Therefore their oil is harder - more expensive - to extract. That expense includes not just money but energy. I.e., we'll need to use more oil to get that oil out.
That's the point of the "peak oil" idea. We've plucked the low-hanging fruit. To get more fruit, we need to climb the tree. But tree-climbing is hungry work. Fortunately, we've got a food source - the fruit we've been harvesting. Unfortunately, that means there's less fruit to go into the boxes...
The reason a company has a right to protect their "brand" is to protect the consumer. Trademark law (legitimate trademark law, anyway) is meant to protect the public by preventing counterfeiting of goods, not to empower companies to rip off customers by shutting down "unauthorized" resellers who don't charge high enough prices.
Does eBay have any assets in France? Or can they, hopefully, tell the court to go stick its head in a pig?
Contact your credit card company, and (if the charge went though them) PayPal. You should be able to register a fraud complaint and get your money back.
It stood. RTFA: "This ruling came down against eBay on two fronts. The court faulted the online company for `guilty negligence,' for not doing enough to prevent fake goods from being sold on its site. The court also ruled that eBay was responsible for the `illicit sale' of perfumes from the LVMH empire, which can be sold only through the brands' `selective distribution networks.'"
You can sell GPLed software. And most software is bespoke.
I've put a roof over my head since 1991 by writing software. Almost all of that software could have been developed under the GPL, because it was either for in-house use, or for a single client (often one to whom we were giving source anyway), or small group of clients who were competitors (and thus wouldn't have shared to the software with each other) and who wanted close support from us.
There's still plenty of software development work - well-paid development work - in a GPL'd world.
Sounds like a job for an OpenBrick. Or a decTOP (nee AMC PIC), if you can find one.
Shouldn't you be using port 587 for that?
Perhaps. My point is only that the "my plane! Mine! Mine! Mine!" argument is bogus.
It may well be that kill switches on small planes would be more trouble than any potential benefit - that sounds reasonable at first blush. But that's not the argument you presented.
Your plane, your property, fine. You want to fly that plane in public airspace? You want the privilege of flying over my house? Then there's a reasonable justification to put various regulations on your plane.
Well, the whole idea of age cutoff for legal purchases is pretty dumb. Hell, if you want to get kids to quit smoking, set a maximum age, not a minimum age - make it look like smoking is something only kids do, and they won't want to do it. Make it look like something only adults do, and you won't be able to stop teens.
You can buy beer out of vending machines on the streets of Japan, though they are usually turned off late at night. I believe the assumption is that during the day, watchful adults would scold whippersnappers trying to buy an Asahi out of a machine.
These machines are not intended for installation in bars, but on the street.
Nothing at all - in a social studies class. I don't know anyone who argues against that. But discussion of religious beliefs doesn't belong in a biology class.
??? A heck of a lot of people certainly are advocating preaching to kids in the schools.
Like the insertion of "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance, "In God We Trust" was a Cold War invention, meant to unite us against those Godless Communists. It's ignorant bullshit - and a blatantly unconstitutional "establishment" of religion.
Not really. Many of the founders were Deists. The idea of democracy and the structure of the republic are Greco-Roman inventions, developed long before Jeshua ben Joseph started his schtick. The Treaty of Tripoli, which notes that "the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion", was ratified in 1797 without any furor.
Seems to me the only form of government that could be based on "Judeo-Christian tenets" (at least mainstream ones) would be a monarchy - the Bible is full of kings, but I don't recall any elections.
Accountants used VisiCalc - it was one of the drivers behind sales of the Apple ][. Secretaries used troff and TeX.
Back in the days of DOS, all sorts of ordinary people without training in CS could use terminal-based software.
I think you need a couple of history lessons.
Polite people bring a towel to sit on when they're in such situations. (Oddly, nudists sitting on a towel is one use that Douglas Adams missed.)
Well, I'm not sure how we jumped from public nudity to screwing in the streets. But there's a difference between non-conformity, rude behavior, and criminal behavior. Non-conformist behavior says "I don't give a damn about your arbitrary social norms," while rude behavior says "I don't give a damn about you," and criminal behavior (truly criminal, that is, harmful to others) goes beyond that to actively says "Screw you."
I don't have a problem with hygiene codes. No shoes, no shirt, no pants, no service, fine. But a very small part of the world consists of grocery stores, and saying "you need to have clothes on in the produce isle!" does not justify making a criminal out of me if I walk out on my front porch with no pants on. Criminalization of behavior should be the exception.
It's already at $5 where you are? Fsck.
But it was never about making oil cheap to the consumer. It's about denying oil to the U.S.'s economic-political rivals, and about profits for oil corporations.
Big oil is doing very well, with profits at high levels, and a new round of no-bid contracts going out in Iraq they're finally getting back into the part of the game Iraq kicked them out of decades ago.
The investment class isn't much impacted by paying $100 instead of $50 to fill their SUV, that's chump change.
So, yeah, Bush is a hell of an oil man. He's done wonders for the industry.
Yeah, yeah, "57 states" and "fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today" were funny slips of the tongue.
But they no more means that he's as dumb as W than your typo of "One" for "Once" makes you a dunce. (This guarantees at least one typo in this post.)
Right - blurring is anti-aliasing's job.
Sorry, no. Charter Communications is a corporation; it's very existence is a privilege, not a right. In a sane system, people should be able to petition the government that created a corporation to make said corporation behave in a manner congruent with the public interest.
You and I are natural persons and have natural rights to live more or less as we please. Corporations are artificial creations of the state and have no natural rights; the fact that the law grants them most of the same rights as natural persons is one of the great destructive absurdities of the industrial age.
Standard weights and measures are vital for commerce. It's logical that the Department of Commerce is responsible for our official measurements of time.
Phobos and Deimos may be captured asteroids, or at least formed out of the same junk pile that became the asteroid belt.